DERRICK AUSTIN

Sweet Boys

after Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby

define this temple of erasure and refinement.Sweet boys like tropic flowers, machetes, and blood-sweat.Sweet boys and their archaic smiles. Pursed lipslike the leaves of an unopened book. Sweet boys shockthe antebellum night like ghost trees blanched by salt. Sweet boys, the Southern Gothic swaying in your dreams to make your sleep easy, their bodies now magical––burning, dismembered, singing—to make the mytheasy. Take a picture. Sweet boys consider the daily minstrelsy:white men throwing signs and smiling for photos, their grins like flesh wounds, and there, the white woman assessing the sphinx's ass and genitals. Photo. Photo. Photo.Sweet boys think This is what it is to be a nigger. A language of locusts and honey in your mouths, a poultice of resinin the mouths of the dead. Sweet boys like jawbreakers.Sweet boys balloon with fire. Sweet boys chase each other througha burning mansion, and you all merely marvel at the light.

189 The Paris-American

Derrick Austin is a Cave Canem fellow and earned his MFA at
the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in New England Review, Image: A
Journal of Arts and Religion, Crab
Orchard Review, Memorious, Unsplendid, and other journals. He is
also a Pushcart Prize nominee.